Obama Is the Hope of a Tired Empire

An indebted people can elect hope; it cannot repeal consequence.

Barack Obama has won. The United States has elected its first Black president in the middle of two wars, a financial crisis, an exhausted presidency, rescued banks, families losing homes, panicked markets, and an elite trying to explain why the richest country in the world had to turn the taxpayer into Wall Street's guarantor.

The night will be historic. There is no reason to deny it. There are moments when politics touches symbols that exceed program, party, and spreadsheet. A country born declaring liberty while tolerating slavery has just placed a Black man in the White House. That has moral weight. Whoever dismisses that weight out of cynicism reveals poverty of historical imagination.

But symbols do not pay debt. Inspiration does not recapitalize banks. Rhetoric does not heal empire. And hope, when elevated into a method of government, can become only a more beautiful way to postpone pain.

Obama arrives as the antidote to the Bush era. That is his strength. The American voter voted against exhaustion. Against Iraq without glory. Against Wall Street without shame. Against a right that seemed to have confused patriotism with obedience and markets with license. Against a presidency that left September 11 with immense moral capital and ended surrounded by long war, deficit, financial crisis, and civilizational fatigue.

But winning against something is not the same as governing for something.

The world will celebrate Obama as restoration. Europeans will sigh as if America had returned to the civilized table. Young people will speak of change. Minorities will speak of symbolic repair. Democrats will speak of mandate. Intellectuals will speak of a new era. Markets may breathe for a few hours. Diplomats will write sentimental paragraphs. Newspapers will use the word "historic" until it loses blood.

I see something more austere: a tired empire hiring a poet to administer the accounting of a fire.

Obama will inherit a crisis that did not begin yesterday. The financial collapse is only the visible part. Underneath lie household debt, public deficits, expensive wars, aging infrastructure, displaced industry, a costly health-care system, rising inequality, dependence on financed consumption, cultural polarization, and an elite that has specialized in speaking to the people as if speaking to a focus group.

Candidate Obama was a canvas. Each group painted its desire onto him. For the left, social justice. For moderates, competence. For Black Americans, historical repair without violence. For the young, the future. For foreigners, a less arrogant America. For markets, perhaps rationality. For the tired, rest. For the guilty, absolution. For idealists, a beginning again.

The problem with being a canvas is that, after the election, the paint dries.

The presidency will require choices that destroy part of the fantasy. He will have to save banks many people hate. He will have to stimulate the economy by increasing deficits others fear. He will have to deal with wars he promised to end or reorganize, but which do not obey campaign calendars. He will have to govern an American machine that loves reform in speeches and litigates every screw in practice. He will have to face medical, financial, military, energy, union, technology, and partisan interests. He will have to convert movement into administration.

Politics as movement is music. Politics as government is plumbing.

Obama's risk is not lack of intelligence. He appears intelligent. The risk is excess projection by others. The man elected yesterday may be smaller than the myth required to elect him. This happens to leaders in times of exhaustion. The people do not vote only for proposals; they vote for purification. They want to wash their civic guilt in the face of someone new.

America chose elegance after years of harshness. Cadence after noise. Biography after dynasty. Promise after collapse. But reality does not negotiate with aesthetics.

The financial crisis will continue. Even if panic is contained, scars will remain. There will be unemployment. There will be deleveraging. There will be rage against rescued banks. There will be broken families. There will be new rules. There will be fights over health care, taxes, energy, and war. And above all there will be a question few will ask honestly: what kind of republic does the United States become when its middle class realizes the social contract was rewritten without its signature?

For decades, the American promise was simple: work, buy a home, educate your children, trust the future. Now the house falls in price, the job moves abroad, student debt grows, health care costs a fortune, the bank is saved, wages stagnate, and experts explain that all of this is globalization, efficiency, innovation, or the cycle.

Correct words, perhaps. Politically insufficient.

That anger does not disappear with Obama. It merely changes rooms. Part of it voted for him. Part of it does not yet know whom it will vote for in the future. The Democrats' mistake will be to believe the victory of 2008 ends America's cultural crisis. It does not. It may even mask it. The legitimacy crisis of an elite does not end when it finds a more eloquent representative. It ends when it changes its relationship with consequence.

If Obama saves the system without punishing its priests sufficiently, the left will become resentful. If he punishes too much, the financial system may freeze further. If he spends to revive the economy, the fiscal right will reorganize with fury. If he does not spend, he will inherit depression. If he tries to reform health care, he will face giant interests. If he abandons wars quickly, he will be accused of weakness. If he maintains them, he will look like continuity. If he speaks of unity, he will discover that unity is a beautiful word for conflicts not yet priced.

The president-elect has rhetorical virtue, but the country needs civic virtue. They are different things.

Churchill came to power offering sacrifice because the threat was external and visible. Obama arrives offering hope because the threat is internal, financial, diffuse, and morally confused. It is harder to lead against a spreadsheet than against an army. The enemy in uniform organizes the national soul. The enemy embedded in mortgages, derivatives, deficits, hospitals, lobbyists, and consumption habits divides the national soul.

Marcus Aurelius would advise the new president to distrust the applause. Today's applause contains disguised demands. Cicero would ask whether the American republic can still subordinate private money to the common good. Aquinas would say justice is not majority emotion, but the correct ordering of means to ends. Augustine would remind us that no earthly city is saved by rhetoric, however beautiful, if it continues loving its own glory more than truth.

Obama's election will also change world politics. Hostile countries will test whether elegance means weakness. Allies will test whether America still pays the bill. Europe will want protection without obedience. China will keep buying time and Treasuries. Russia will measure borders. The Middle East will not remain moved for long by speeches in Cairo or on any other stage. The world likes humble America, as long as it remains strong enough to sustain the order everyone criticizes.

This is the central hypocrisy of the international system: many countries denounce American power while organizing their strategies around the assumption that it will continue to exist.

Brazil will watch in enchantment. Brazilian politics loves an external symbol it can import without cost. They will say Obama proves the strength of democracy, inclusion, generational change, modern communication. All true in part. But the most important lesson will be ignored: even the most powerful country in the world can be captured by bad incentives, arrogant elites, excess credit, and badly conceived wars.

America has not fallen. One should not exaggerate. Great powers rarely fall on an election night. But it has revealed fatigue. And imperial fatigue is dangerous: first it appears as desire for change, then as impatience, then as polarization, then as the search for harder men.

Obama may become a great president. He may be merely a necessary president. He may save part of the system and disappoint part of the hope. But one thing seems clear: he was not elected because America is calm. He was elected because America knows, even without saying it, that something has moved out of place.

The crowd in Chicago will cry. Perhaps it should. Human history has few scenes of symbolic repair. But after the tear will come the budget. After the speech will come unemployment. After the inauguration will come the creditors. After the Nobel they may want to give him before the work, will come the enemies. After "yes, we can," will come the forgotten question: can what, at what cost, and paid by whom?

Modern politics has become addicted to therapeutic language. Healing, unity, hope, change, rebuilding, transformation. Noble words. But republics are not consulting rooms. They are arenas of interest, memory, virtue, fear, law, force, and limit.

Obama won because he offered the American people a better image of themselves. He will govern by having to show the same people the bill for the previous image.

That will be his tragedy and his opportunity.

If he understands that hope must discipline, not anesthetize, he may become a statesman. If he believes the beauty of the mandate substitutes for the hardness of reality, he will be only another talented man crushed by the myth he helped create.

Hope elects. Only truth governs.

Leo Bentier